I'm the founding partner of Proteus International, and author of Growing Great Employees, Being Strategic, and Leading So People Will Follow. You can follow me on Twitter @erikaandersen. My websites are erikaandersen.com, and www.proteus-international.com. I'm insatiably curious. I love figuring out how people, situations and objects work, and how they could work better: faster, smarter, deeper, with greater satisfaction, more affection, and a higher fun quotient.

Why Top Talent Leaves: Top 10 Reasons Boiled Down to 1

Eric Jackson, a fellow Forbes blogger I follow and find both funny and astute, wrote a really spot-on post last month about why top talent leaves large corporations. He offered ten reasons, all of which I agreed with – and all of which I’ve seen played out again and again, over the course of 25 years of coaching and consulting. The post was wildly popular – over 1.5 million views at this writing.

So why do we find this topic so interesting? I suspect it’s because we’re genuinely curious: What would make a very senior executive – someone who most certainly has been courted by his or her organization and then paid huge sums of money to join – decide to pack it in? Is it greed (an even richer offer down the street)? Hubris? Short attention span? Or do 1%ers actually leave jobs for the same reasons as the average Joe or Josie?

According to Jackson (and, again, I agree with him) top talent does indeed leave for the same reasons everyone else does. If I were to distill his ‘top ten reasons’ down to one, it’s this:

Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.

About half of Eric’s ten reasons are about poor people management – either systemically, as in poor performance feedback, or individually, as in, my boss sucks. And the other half are about organizational lameness: shifting priorities, no vision, close-mindedness.

It really is that simple. Not easy, mind you, but remarkably simple. If you want to keep your best people:

1) Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

2) Then be clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as an organization – not only in terms of financial goals, but in a more three-dimensional way. What’s your purpose; what do you aspire to bring to the world? What kind of a culture do you want to create in order to do that? What will the organization look, feel and sound like if you’re embodying that mission and culture? How will you measure success? And then, once you’ve clarified your hoped-for future, consistently focus on keeping that vision top of mind and working together to achieve it.

I’ve worked with client organizations that do those two things, and people stay and thrive. I’ve worked with and observed client organizations that don’t – and it’s a revolving door. And that’s true at all levels – not just for “top talent.”

It’s fascinating to me: Why don’t more CEOs and their teams make sure these two things happen in their organizations? What do you think?

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

While I think you’re onto something here, I have to point out the obvious. You say “boiled down to one”, but using “and” in that reason creates two reasons, which you clearly realize since at the end you break that compound reason into two (numbered) points. You even end saying to make sure that these two things happen.

“Why don’t more CEOs and their teams make sure these two things happen in their organizations?”

Because it scares them because they think it’s a threat to their positions. They don’t want really top talent because they figure it always comes with top ambitions. If your boss gets to thinking that you’re smarter or more capable than he is, your job is history.

This is surely the reason top talent leaves. But underneath this “umbrella” reason might be at least a few more specific reasons(?). One example would be that a “top talent” individual finds that their potential and value to a company is being defined by management in a way that does not match with the individual’s self-belief and/or personal career goals. Employers seem to tend to define their employees by what they are currently doing, not by what they may be capable of doing – even if the employee is considered “top talent” within the org. It seems to be very difficult to shift that way of thinking unless it is ingrained in the culture to do so.

Honestly, this gave me a lot to think about over lunch. When I think about the two points that were outlined on why people leave, I began to wonder why I am still here.

I have a direct supervisor who is only in the office roughly half of the time. The time that he is here is not really spent managing or motivating myself or the rest of the department, but rather the time is spent bringing him up to speed on what he missed and managing his expectations. It’s painfully obvious, I don’t need him to be a boss. What is worse is every time he tries to manage (especially when he is out of the office) it comes across as micro-managing; Do I really need him to email me a reminder to talk to the guy two doors down from me when he is 1500 miles away?

Second, we just received feedback on a survey that rated our services. Our scores left a lot be desired. I lamented to my direct supervisor that “we seem to be very adept at doing things right, but are we doing the right things”. The silence was deafening.

There are two issues I see: 1. Schools are failing us at teaching business skills, i.e. their teaching the craft of a business (law, medicine, graphic art, engineering, etc.) and not the business of their craft (how to run a successful business, making a profit, leadership, etc.) and 2. Businesses treat people like employees, associates, and other terms that focus a person on their “job” and not their work. A quote by General Eisenhower in my book states, “It is better to have one person working WITH you than three people working FOR you.” And morality is at the core of all of this.

You say: “Create an organization where those who manage others are hired for their ability to manage well, supported to get even better at managing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.”

It seems you restrict “Top Talent” to the talent of managing other, not to expert technical skills. This is very restrictive to my point of view. Their are plenty of top talent that are absolutely necessary to plenty of corporation but are not managers.

To compare organizations to sport, you would put the emphasis on Coaches and Managers and forget about the sportsman themselves? Is Messi an important part of Barcelona football team? He is not managing anybody there (at least not officially). Is Federer a “Top Talent” in tennis? How many people is he managing?

I completely agree with “Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.” But I would change the “If you want to keep your best people: Create an organization where those who produce are hired for their ability to produce well, supported to get even better at producing, and held accountable and rewarded for doing so.

I have seen plenty of talented people to pack it in, because they were experts, bringing a lot to a corporation but were forced into management position where they did not excel as the only way to promotion and rewards while less talented experts were promoted faster as there technical expertise was less critical.

Management would do a lot of good for their corporation if they accepted that “management” is not the only talent a corporation needs!

I really think it comes down to “uninspiring” – at the executive level in a large company its about being inspired by the vision. Everyone needs to be rowing the oars in the same direction and 9 out of 10 people are all rowing in a direction that is best for their career and not about the big vision. This probably means there isn’t a vision or it changes frequently and people can’t get behind it. If I am challenged every day and inspired by the culture, the team, the vision, than I am in it for the long haul. If not, count me out.

First, excuse my English. For me is a second language. Bellows there are my personal opinions.

The problem with large Companies today is that they are run by bureaucrats and not by people that have the talent to manage.

To be a good Manager (in my opinion) you need first to have managing talent and the school that you have (in case you have one) is just to learn faster helpful stuff related with your job. If you do not have the talent to begin with, the school does not help too much.

Same is with engineer talent (I would call creative engineering). The school just speeds the knowledge and experience, but if you do not have it the school does very little.

In quite a few large Companies, the Management tries to do design as an automated process. This you can do with machines but not with people. Every person is unique. They are dividing the process of design in many parts, and expect that everyone works a little piece of it. A creative engineer needs to be involved in all aspects of the design to be able to do a good job. Talented engineers do not work well in an environment where they are boxed. In my personal opinion this is the main reason they are leaving large companies.

“Top talent leave an organization when they’re badly managed and the organization is confusing and uninspiring.”

That’s not one reason, that’s three – being badly managed, a confusing organization, and an uninspiring organization.

I’d argue against all of these as being the main drivers. Top talent – or the best and brightest people – can figure out how to be successful even if their managers suck. They can also draw upon their own intrinsic qualities (self-directed, self-inspired, etc etc) to navigate organizational confusion or a lack of organizational inspiration. I can’t imagine truly “top talent” types that didn’t have a fairly strong internal locus of control.

The TRULY talented people at the top of any organization leave because their are too many barriers – such as the ones above and many others – to having impact. Once your work no longer matters or no longer matters as much to whatever end-user audience (customer, student, internal client, etc) should be receiving it, we move on and find a place that has fewer or none of those barriers to impact.